(Knoxville News Sentinel)
Cray recently delivered the final 26 cabinets of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Gaea climate research supercomputer, which is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory...According to Jeff Nichols, an associate lab director at ORNL who heads the computational science director, the Gaea system is still in two pieces. The first piece is the original 14-cabinet system with a peak capability of 260 teraflops, Nichols said. The second piece is the new 26-cabinet system with a capability of 720 teraflops, he said...12/20

(Innovations Report) Using statistical analysis methods to examine rainfall extremes in India, a team of researchers has made a discovery that resolves an ongoing debate in published findings and offers new insights...The study, initiated by Auroop Ganguly and colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reports no evidence for uniformly increasing trends in rainfall extremes averaged over the entire Indian region...12/20

(Knoxville News Sentinel) Oak Ridge National Laboratory is engaged in a multiyear, multimillion-dollar research effort to better understand how mercury behaves — and sometimes devilishly transforms itself — in the environment....12/20

DOE

(Knoxville News Sentinel)
Ted Sherry is leaving federal service, but he's not leaving Oak Ridge. Sherry, the National Nuclear Security Administration's manager at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant for the past five years, is apparently considering multiple job offers at the moment...12/21

(Knoxville News Sentinel)
Mercury has been oozing into East Fork Poplar Creek in Oak Ridge for decades.
The metal also known as quicksilver was used to enrich lithium for use in hydrogen bombs built during the Cold War to intimidate — or, if necessary, destroy — the Soviet Union...12/21

State & Regional

(AP) The Tennessee Valley Authority has reported finding elevated levels of radioactive tritium in a groundwater sample from a new onsite monitoring well at the Sequoyah Nuclear Plant near Chattanooga...12/20

National

(NY Times)
The United States and South Korea made cautious overtures toward North Korea on Wednesday as Kim Jong-un, thrust into the international spotlight following the death of his father moved swiftly to tighten internal security and rally support from the hard-line military...12/21

science & technology

(NPR)
A committee that advises the government says that details of two controversial experiments on bird flu virus should not be made public, because of fears that the work could provide a recipe for a bioweapon...12/20

(Popular Science)
Scientists have been trying for a while now to recreate the process of photosynthesis, using sunlight and water to spark chemical reactions. Now a team from Penn State University has done one better, producing an engineered biological system that can produce a hydrogen biofuel twice as fast as nature...12/20

(Physorg.com)
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a prototype device capable of absolute measurements of optical power delivered through an optical fiber...12/21

Other Stories

(Wall Street Journal)
A group of hackers in China breached the computer defenses of America's top business-lobbying group and gained access to everything stored on its systems, including information about its three million members, according to several people familiar with the matter...12/21

(Wired) The troops have come home, the flag has been been lowered, and the Iraq War is officially in the past for the U.S. military. But the military is holding on to a major souvenir of the war: a massive database packed with retinal scans, thumb prints and other biometric data identifying millions of Iraqis. It will be a tool for counterterrorism long after the Iraq War becomes a fading memory...12/21

Disclaimer: News stories linked on this page do not reflect the opinions or views of ORNL staff or management.